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temperancecain · 4 months

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As per the results of my recent pole, here's the first chapter of my Torchwood fic. (Warning for use of language, mentions of PTSD and spoilers for the end of Doctor Who Season Three and Torchwood Season 2. None of the recognizable characters belong to me and this was written purely for fun.)

I Found Love When It Wasn't Supposed To Be

Chapter One: Fell Down a Rabbit Hole

"You owe me ten quid."

"I do not."

"You do," Owen insisted, leaning back in his swivel chair, drink stirrer caught between his teeth giving his smile a childish edge. "Last week, down the pub, I said there was no way Jack was ever gonna tell us what really happened while he was gone, and look? He's as tight lipped as a fucking teenager, that one. And just as bloody mouthy, thinkin' he can order us around like…like-"

"Like employees?" Toshiko helpfully chimed in, eyes shining with warring shades of amusement and consternation behind the purple frames of her glasses. "He is the boss, Owen. Just because Gwen took over for a little while doesn't mean that it's not Jack's name on the door anymore. Well, if we even had a door that is, rather than just a big cog thing set into some concrete…My point is, he's been through a lot, and it's not like any of us like to be exactly forthcoming about our own traumas, is it? He just needs time to adjust, is all. To remember that he's home, and has people here for him."

Owen let out a mocking scoff. "Time, right. Something an immortal has in infinite supply and us mere humans have diddly squat of. It'll be a miracle if we get anything out of him before we're in the Torchwood Care Home, eating jello out of plastic cups and arguing over Countdown."

"Don't you do that anyway?" Ianto asked, coming up behind them in that silent way of his. "I take it you're talking about Jack behind his back?"

The doctor had the decency to look chagrined, hands raised in the universal sign of supplication. "Ianto, mate, you know I didn't mean anything by-"

Letting out a heavy sigh, the young agent pulled out a stool, plopping it down in the empty space between their two desks. "I agree with you, completely. You know he took me to dinner last week, just like he promised, and every time I tried to get something out of him, he changed the bloody subject! To me, of all things! Like I wanna talk about what movies I've seen or the new lasagna recipe I got from Gwen when he's been gone for months on end and then turns up right out of the bloody blue! I thought-I thought things would be different," Ianto admitted, so quiet they could barely hear it. "He seemed like he might have actually…"

"Changed?" Toshiko said, not unkindly. "He did seem to have a renewed sense of…something when he came back, all grand speeches and bold proclamations. And now, it's just back to work as usual. That's got to be confusing, most of all for you given your…thing."

"I don't even know if we have a thing. Jack's not exactly one to put labels on things. He's far too…casual for that. But it's really bloody irritating and I just…realized we've spent the past two hundred and seventy nine seconds talking about my love life, which is weird." He turned to Owen. "Why haven't you thrown a pencil at me or something like you normally would?"

"How little you think of me. Gee, Ianto, I'm so hurt." Going back to his notes for a few seconds, he eventually snapped his book shut and kicked his feet up onto his desk. "I dunno, mate. Just trying to be a little more…sensitive, to your situation. We've all had our shovelfuls of shit this last year and…after Diane, guess I know where you're coming from a little more, is all. But don't expect it to become a regular thing, yeah? There's only so much talk about feelings a bloke can take."

Ianto offered him a half smile. "Don't I know it." Glancing down at his watch, the Welshman squinted his eyes, asking them curiously, "Wasn't Gwen supposed to be back with takeaway by now?" when the door to the Hub ground open, the agent in question sauntering across the walkway, plastic bags held aloft in triumph.

"I am. Amazing. Seriously. You lot should name a holiday after me after what I did to get all this," Gwen declared, depositing the various containers on their worn coffee table. "Stood in line for twenty five minutes I did, then when I realized they'd forgotten the egg rolls, I went back and spent another ten minutes in there waiting."

"A real hero," Tosh agreed fondly, abandoning her carousel of computers and making her way to the sofa, eagerly digging into a container of mu shu pork. It was almost midnight, and by most people's standards not the most conventional time to be eating fast food -or even being awake- but the Rift activity had been particularly volatile today and Jack wanted them at the ready, just in case. So it was all hands on deck, no one going home until the sun rose, then back again after a whopping three hour's worth of sleep to do it all over again.

The life of public servants, so glamorous.

Gathering around the table, Ianto began doling out napkins and cutlery and reminding people that coasters were an actual thing as the three of them chatted away. Gwen was too busy looking up at Jack's office, the single light still burning catching her attention as it shimmered against the translucent glass walls. Staggering over the amassed assembly of legs and elbows, Gwen extricated herself and climbed the stairs, knuckles knocking faintly on the glass so as not to startle their fearless leader.

"You got a hit on some Rift activity?" Jack asked abruptly, not even bothering to look up from his sheaf of paperwork.

Gwen cleared her throat, suddenly nervous. "No, um, I just got us all a spot to eat, wanted to know if you wanted anything or not."

"I'm good, thanks." Not even a flicker.

Things had been…awkward, ever since he got back. Since he'd found out about her marrying Rhys. He'd looked so happy to see her, and yet it all drained away like water down a plughole when he took sight of that diamond engagement ring. And his return, after so many agonizing and uncertain months away, had pulled all her old feelings right back up to the surface, despite how deeply she'd buried them inside herself, like driftwood being brought back up in the tide. He was Jack, and yet he was…not, and all she wanted to do was help him, but she couldn't do that if she didn't know what was wrong, if he didn't just open his mouth and bloody tell her like a normal person.

But Jack wasn't normal. He never had been, and he never would be. And maybe that was half the problem.

"Okay then. Well, you know where we are if you change your mind," she said softly before making her way back to her friends, letting herself get lost in some conversation over one of Tosh and Owen's first cases together.

***

Jack Harkness was tired. And for a man that didn't really sleep, he supposed that was kind of a given. But it was more than that. So, so much more. He'd been back for two weeks now, and yet every time he closed his eyes, he expected to be back on the Valiant when he opened them, chained up and bleeding, waiting for that automatic door to hiss open and the Master to swagger in, pointed shoes squeaking incongruously against the metallic grating of the floor. Sometimes it was a cattle prod. Sometimes he'd pump the vents full of poison and watch him choke to death. Sometimes it was just a plain old beating when he was bored or if he wasn't getting what he wanted out of the Doctor, when his 'puppet' refused to dance to its owner's drums.

Some days, he left him completely alone. And that was almost worse. The silence. The emptiness. The gnawing, aching feeling in his chest, thinking about everyone he loved in danger, not knowing whether they were alive or not. If they needed him. About Martha, out there all on her own in a world gone to hell in an intricately woven hand basket. About the Doctor, caged and powerless as no one so brave and wonderful should ever be. About Rose, stuck in some parallel universe but mercifully far away from all this.

The waiting. The waiting got to you.

He was home now. He was fine and everything had been fixed and all those people had been saved and everyone he loved was safe and it was okay, it was all good, it had all been wiped away like it never happened…but it did. And he didn't have anyone to talk to about it, no one to share in the burden of these memories. No one would understand, without having been there. What it was like. How it felt, to die over and over and over again, more times than he ever had before. He didn't want to scar anyone else with that, to scare them, so he kept quiet. Took Ianto out to dinner where the sound of the clinking silverware was too much like knives sharpening against metal. Tried not to flinch every time Gwen brushed against him in the passenger seat as she fiddled with the radio because apparently his taste in music was too 'old-timey.' Fought to keep his breathing even when the lights went out and the Hub wound down and it was just him, alone in the dark once more, an enemy of his own mind.

Jack knew what PTSD was. Had seen enough soldiers battle through it during the countless wars he'd been a part of, sometimes winning, sometimes not. But not him, never him. Jack Harkness dusted himself off, and carried on, not even stopping to let his wounds scab over, much less heal properly. Moving, forward, forward, forward. Always forward, never back, just like the Doctor.

He'd always idolized him so much. Now he'd give almost anything to be a little less like him, a little less broken, a little more whole.

He felt disconnected and irritated and on edge at every little noise and he hated it, hated it so much, because he was supposed to be better than this, was a leader and it was his job to look after everybody and he couldn't do that if he was wasting all his time on trying to hold himself together. He'd make a mistake, he'd miss something, and someone he loved would end up paying the price; he couldn't allow that. He wouldn't allow that, not again, not in a million years. Not after what happened to Gray. So he had to get over this, had to find some way to beat it, to fix himself. Even if it killed him -which was okay, since he'd just come straight back to life, like always.

But the cracks were getting more and more noticeable, the strain ever more apparent. So he tried to keep his distance, excluding himself, secluding himself in his office, behind his walls of glass and watching on as his team talked and joked and laughed without him. And it hurt, it hurt so much because that was what he'd fought so hard to get back to, and now he couldn't even be a part of it, looking in on the life he'd once had and wanted again, still wanted, always wanted.

Thankfully, the piercing wail of an alarm cut through his melancholia like a knife, allowing him to instantly slip into his designated role as effortlessly as he donned his dark wool coat. "What have we got, people?"

"A major energy disturbance, about four miles from here. Significant increases in Rift activity, almost off the charts. Jack, I've never seen readings this high," Tosh rattled off, food forgotten in her lap as her fingers flew against her keyboards, reams of text appearing on the screen, maps of Cardiff flashing with warning lights.

"Any idea what caused it?"

"We've been monitoring everything all day and there's been no unusual disturbances, no police reports with any of the telltale signs of alien activity or interference, but the earlier blips suggest that whatever it is, it's escalating, and fast."

"Then we better get a move on. Alright team, suit up. We leave in five," Jack ordered, returning to his office and taking out his holster, securing it under his coat as his mind raced through worst case scenarios. They were all piled into the SUV and tearing down the road in under three, and while the immortal marveled at their precision and efficiency, he couldn't help but feel just the tiniest twinge of jealousy that it was under Gwen's leadership that this had come about and not his. While he'd always prided himself of his military strategy, how tightly he ran the ship as it were, perhaps he had been a little too harsh in the past. Maybe they needed a more caring, considerate hand to guide them, given everything they'd been through in the past year or so. Maybe they needed Gwen.

But Jack couldn't allow himself to dwell on it as a few minutes later they were pulling up in an abandoned field, forgotten grasses growing up to their knees as they each jumped down, weapons at the ready, flashlights combating with the glow of the waning moon hanging high above in the sky. Man, he'd had some fun times there. Boot heels carving a swath through the tangled overgrowth, they all scanned the area, but there was no signs of any Rift activity, nothing but insects chirping and the cold autumn wind gusting through the trees like a mournful breath.

"Oh my God. Jack, look at the sky!"

There, splitting the midnight sky like a wound, was a gaping portal, trickling light like blood.

That hadn't been the moon, then. It was over a hundred feet up, golden and glistening, crackling with energy like a lightning strike, equally beautiful and deadly. Never a good combination, Jack knew from experience.

"Tosh, get me a reading!"

"I can't, the system's overloading! It's giving off too much interference."

"How is this possible?" Gwen wondered, eyes wide and panicked in her pale face, tendrils of dark hair floating like underwater seaweed as she gazed up at the giant hole in the sky. "No one can open the Rift from our side like that, not without breaking into the Hub."

"I think you just answered your own question," Owen muttered sarcastically, but it did little to cover the shock etched across his expression.

"Someone's opened the Rift from somewhere else." It was the only thing that made sense. "Question now is why."

The light above seemed to coalesce, churning and pulsing like the unpredictable swirl of a hurricane. There was very little known about Rift portals and their effects, but Jack reckoned it wasn't too good an idea for them all to be standing out in the open like this.

"Everyone, back in the car!" He ordered, tracing his way backwards, gun still pointed to the heavens. And then he heard it. A shout, pained and desperate, as angry as it was desolate.

"Poppy, I'm begging you, you can't do this!"

"Doctor, you know I have no choice!"

His whole body went cold, too many emotions shooting through him at once. Before he even realized it, Jack was sprinting across the field, batting away foliage as he ran at full speed, until he was standing right under the mouth of the portal, craning his neck back as if he could see all the way up there to wherever it led.

"Tosh, can you lock into that audio and link it up to our comms?"

"Already on it!" Their technician hollered, and seconds later, as if he were speaking directly to him, Jack heard the words, *"We can find another way!" It was a voice that the Captain didn't know but a tone that was infinitely familiar. "Please, please, just hold on! I'll pull you up, I'll save you! I promised I'd always save you!"

"And I told you not to make promises you might not be able to keep," the mystery woman answered back, softly chiding him. "The Mnemosyne will keep coming, it'll tear this whole planet apart. Thirteen billion people, each one living for two hundred years. All those memories for it to feed on, it won't be able to resist. And you…you're almost twelve hundred years old, sweethearts. So many memories, good and bad and everything, the entire spectrum of a Time Lord's existence, there's no telling if you'd even survive it. If you can't close the Rift from this side, the very least I can do is take it with me. It won't relinquish its hold on my mind, not when its already started the eradication process. So, I'm asking you, for the sake of everyone on this planet, for you to let me do this. For you to let me go."

"I can't." He sounded like he was crying; Jack had never seen him cry, except when the Master died, when he held him in his arms aboard the Valiant and realized he was all alone once again, the very last of his kind.

"Then I'm so very, very sorry for this, Doctor," the woman said, words dripping with palpable regret. "Just make sure you look after him for me, that's all I ask. I can do this, so long as I know that he'll be alright," and soon followed an indecipherable reply. Seconds later, there was a tremendous boom, a shockwave rippling out and knocking everyone off their feet, slamming them backwards into the siding of the SUV, but Jack regained his bearings almost instantly, mesmerized by the subsequent pulse of green light that lit up the sky, knitting the two sides of portal together like it had never been there at all.

"Is everyone okay?" He shouted into the ensuing silence, ears ringing slightly but seemingly no worse for wear.

"Everyone's good, Jack," Gwen called back, but even as she said the words his attention was being pulled elsewhere, to the object -no, the person- falling from the sky, the form a slash of fiery red like the blazing tail of a comet as they plummeted through the atmosphere. "Oh my God, someone's falling from that thing!"

"If they hit the earth, they'll die instantly," Owen said in that sanitized, clinical way of his, grating on the Captain's nerves harshly.

"Not if we can help it," Jack insisted firmly, hastily holstering his gun so that he could have both hands free. "Ianto, get me one of the containment units and plug it into the laptop. Owen, get out your medkit, we might need to do a little emergency surgery. Tosh, how long before they hit the ground?"

"Twenty seconds, maybe less!"

"Okay then." Striding to the SUV, Jack jumped into the backseat, hacking into the containment shell as he tried to recalibrate it back to its original settings. It was just like he'd done for Rose, all those years ago, bombs and blitzes and balloons in the sky, London on fire and an epidemic he'd never meant to start, a day that would change his life forever and set him on a course he never could have imagined.

"Come on, come on. Please work," he begged, slumping slightly when the settings finally gave way and he got to the core where he could input the new data. Seconds later, he was back in the grass, aiming the device at the descending figure, details becoming more visible as they plummeted through the atmosphere. A red coat, a stream of long brown hair. A woman. The woman. And she was wrestling with something, the shape biting and snarling as they neared the earth. A beam of blue-tinged light shot out, engulfing the two of them and suspending them mid-air.

The beam had worked, just like he thought it would. The hard part was getting them down. Whatever that creature was, it seemed unperturbed by its current state, its howls echoing gruesomely through the night and through the deserted woodland, no doubt freaking the poor creatures dwelling there the heck out.

"Can you shoot it down?" Ianto asked from beside him, his own gun gripped tightly in his hand.

"I think so. But if it keeps struggling, I could end up shooting her."

"Her?" Owen echoed disbelievingly further down the line from them.

"What, you think a guy could fill out a coat like that? Well, anyone who wasn't me, that is," Jack quipped in an effort to hide his quaking nerves. It had been a while since he had to shoot at anything besides that Blowfish last week, and the knowledge that that woman was a friend of the Doctor's and someone he obviously cared very much about made it even worse, the fear of his reaction if Jack ended up hurting her, even by accident.

But he had to try.

Planting his feet, Jack plucked the gun from Ianto's hand and pitched his voice loud enough for them to hear, "Hey, Blubberface, try picking on someone your own size."

As predicted, the creature turned its head, a row of double mouths opening up, casting a long black proboscis into view, curling around the woman's neck like a noose, presumably feeding off of her just as she'd said. Sending up a prayer, Jack lined up the shot and squeezed, two quick successive shots that rippled through the night. There was utter silence, and then a distant thud as the body hit the grass, crumpled amongst the brittle weeds. He could just make out the woman's face, pale and pretty in the moonlight, still hanging like a ghostly apparition in the sky, an angel come to bestow knowledge or bad tidings depending on the day.

"Don't worry, we're going to get you down, alright? Just stay calm," Jack said to her, wordlessly passing Ianto back his gun and ordering Owen and Tosh after the unknown body. "I'm going to release the beam, but don't worry, I'll catch you, okay? I promise."

He saw her nod vaguely, and so he pressed the button, letting her go. She didn't scream, and that was almost worse, a soundless descent as she fell and fell and fell, until she collapsed into his awaiting arms, so hard his muscles shook with strain. Her eyes flew open, glassed over and hazy, but not so much that Jack couldn't make out their distinctive hazel colour.

"Thank you for catching me, Captain Harkness, Sir," the woman thanked him before she went limp, seemingly unconscious.

Thank you so much for reading!! I hope you enjoyed it.

All my love, Temperance Cain.

#torchwood #fanfiction #fanfic #captain jack harkness #ianto jones #toshiko sato #gwen cooper #owen harper #oc character #fanfic writing

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